Transport Tycoon Forums

Could OpenTTD be available for the Windows Store? During Christmastime I switched out my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700 for a Surface 2 with Windows RT 8.1, and I realized that OpenTTD wasn't available for the Windows Store, and since my Surface is an RT tablet, it can't download online EXE files. So I think that OpenTTD, in its next update, should come out for the Windows Store, so I can download it on my Surface RT. Can the OpenTTD techs do that? That would be appreciated.

carllwyman wrote:Could OpenTTD be available for the Windows Store? During Christmastime I switched out my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700 for a Surface 2 with Windows RT 8.1, and I realized that OpenTTD wasn't available for the Windows Store, and since my Surface is an RT tablet, it can't download online EXE files. So I think that OpenTTD, in its next update, should come out for the Windows Store, so I can download it on my Surface RT. Can the OpenTTD techs do that? That would be appreciated.

Problem is that RT and Windows Phones are kind of dead, RT wasn't much of a success and I keep seeing companies pulling app support for Windows Phones. Your just going to have to bite the bullet and live with the fact that you probably wont get most if any of your favorite games on a ARM based Windows platform until Microsoft figures out how to run x86 EXEs on ARM quickly and efficiently (I do believe thy have something in the works but its very slow and wonky)

There is still Windows 10 S mode (which can be disabled) for devices where you only want to install apps from the store
I wouldn't exclude windows store at all (they even just put iTunes!)
Also they don't need to be compiled for ARM, is possible to use the windows store bridge to publish x86 apps wrapped for the store so they can work as always (with some limitations, but it won't hit too much OTTD) but they are running in their own container

The main issue with publishing in Windows Store (or App Store), is our license. Take this for example about App Store (back from 2011): http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.i ... 07973.html

Now I do not know if anything has changed in those 7 years (didn't follow that), but if they still don't allow GPL software, OpenTTD cannot really be published there. And changing our license is a lengthy process ....

Over the years we also had other people published OpenTTD as-if-was-their-own on these Stores, often for money, sometimes with or without a reference back to our website. These binaries are not produced by us, so we can also not tell you which source they represent.

So just to be clear: OpenTTD is currently does not publish its binaries on any Store. If you can find OpenTTD on a Store, it is not published there by us. Use with caution.

Guess we should check if GPL software is allowed on these Stores current day .. as if it is, it is silly not to publish on it.

TrueBrain wrote:The main issue with publishing in Windows Store (or App Store), is our license. Take this for example about App Store (back from 2011): http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.i ... 07973.html

I don't believe that restriction exists on Microsoft's store. In fact, somebody under the name of "RetroAppX" has published OpenTTD 1.7.2 to the store (link here). But who is that? Nobody knows, they're not identified themselves either on TT-Forums or Reddit. There's no way to determine if they've made any changes to the code which runs on the store, we don't know if they're complying with the GPL license. It doesn't appear to be able to run on RT though.

There's no problem with publishing OpenTTD on the Windows Store in terms of licensing - several other open source GPLv2 projects have official binaries available on the Windows Store.

It would be fairly trivial to create a "desktop bridge" version of OpenTTD and publish it - this is basically what "RetroAppX" has done. I've got a version of this working on my own machine, and it is my intention to try to publish this officially for OpenTTD - we may need to try to get Microsoft to remove/rename the unofficial version though, and I'm not sure how straightforward that would be.

An actual UWP (Universal Windows Platform) app is a bit more of a challenge. I have started work on this out of interest more than anything, but the APIs are a lot more limited, not all of the libraries that OpenTTD uses are currently working fully on UWP, and we'd need to basically write a Direct2D renderer for OpenTTD (or use SDL2 - and currently our SDL driver targets SDL1). The sound driver would also need rewriting (I've already done this - I've created an XAudio2 driver for OpenTTD, which will work on the standard Windows desktop as well). This would make compilation for ARM, etc, easier. It is a much bigger project though, and I'm not sure there's quite as much benefit for the time and restrictions involved.

Submit PRs for the stuff you do have working?

That's my plan - noticed some glitches in the audio last time I tested the XAudio2 driver though so want to give it a check over first! As always, it's just finding the time...

Really looking forward to this Can we help in any way?

Here's something to start with.

https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/pull/6783

Owen, any updates for 1.11.0 on Microsoft Store? Someone on Reddit is asking.

It was submitted on release day, usually I get an e-mail when it’s approved but that doesn’t seem to have happened. I’ll look into it.

EDIT: Looks like this is live now.

They initially rejected our new version; turns out we pointed to an URL for the privacy policy that was old and no longer working. So I fixed that yesterday, and that seemed to have fixed the issue

Ah, thanks. Strange they never e-mailed us, we certainly used to get such notifications.